What a Dog Means

Yes, even The New Yorker has dogs, particularly in the days when James Thurber contributed his distinctive vision of canine attributes. A recent essay by commentator-at-large Adam Gopnik is part conversion story, part book review, and all dog. In the opening, Gopnik admits to being ignorant about dogs, to the point that he agrees with a friend who asserts that “Dogs are failed humans.” (Really, it’s because of humans who are “failed humans” that people turn to non-speaking hairy quadrupeds.)  He then narrates his daughter’s quest to get a dog, a well-researched quest that ends with a Havanese (formerly the little white dog of Havana) puppy named Butterscotch as resident of their New York apartment. Gopnik was expecting the trials of having a newborn baby in the house, but was happily surprised:

All the creature wanted was to please. Unlike a child, who pleases in spite of herself, Butterscotch wanted to know what she could do to make you happy, if only you kept her fed and let her play. She had none of the imperiousness of a human infant. [. . .] What makes kids so lovable is the tension between their helplessness and their drive to deny it. Butterscotch, though, was a born courtesan.

But besides “compelling sweetness,” Butterscotch occasionally indulged in a petite rampage, leading Gopnik to the question of how, when, why, wolves and dogs split somewhere on the evolutionary branch.

Me and

 

 

and my cousin?

            For answers, many tentative and speculative, Gopnik turns to a number of recent and soon-to-be-released books. These include Edmund Russell, “Evolutionary History,” which supposes people captured wolf pups and then demurs that, given wolves’ intransigence to human commands, it is difficult to believe early peoples persisted with wild youngsters. Raymond and Lorna Coppinger in “Dogs” (2001) propose that dogs domesticated themselves, choosing to see what was offered by the circle of human warmth, cooking, and garbage. Mark Derr, in his forthcoming book “How the Dog Became the Dog,” focuses more on the evolving temperament and role of dogs. For Derr, breeding and training have created a regrettable shift from dog as partner and ally to dog as sycophant and totally needy dependent.  John Bradshaw in “Dog Sense” points to a different fate for many contemporary dogs: they are the wanderers and scavengers of mean streets. As Gopnik summarizes, “the usual condition of a dog is to be a pigeon.”

The different theories about how dogs came to be dogs hint that “the line between artificial and natural selection seems far less solid, and the role of man at the center far less fixed. Indeed Russell suggests that even our distinct breeds may be more drifts than decisions.”

Gopnik, from his stance as “the full authority of fourteen months of dog,” says these evolutionary and anthropological accounts neglect the simple concept that “people love pets.” Even “primitive” societies took in animals that served no useful purpose other than to just be there.  And dogs have a powerful role in our mythology: “The range of evolutionary just-so stories and speculations is itself proof of the way dogs have burrowed into our imaginations. Half the pleasure of having a dog, I could see, was storytelling about the dog.”

For another scientific approach to canines, he turns to Alexandra Horowitz’s “Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell and Know.” Besides detailing the significance of scents to a dog, Horowitz debunks the Cesar-Millan type emphasis on “pack” behavior: “Dogs, she explains, are domesticated animals, and to treat them as though they were still in a pack rather than long adapted to a subservient role in a human family is absurd as treating a child as though it were ‘really’ still a primate living in a tree” (50). Gopnik finds Horowitz’s arguments compelling, and acknowledges that she had previously worked at The New Yorker, while he is dismissive of Kathy Rudy’s “Toward a New Animal Advocacy.” He writes of the author’s academic premise: “Rudy believes that dogs have been as oppressed and colonized as Third World peoples have, and that what they need is not empathy but liberation. She has a confused notion of something that she calls ‘capitalism,’ which is somehow held uniquely responsible for the oppression of animals, including dogs.”  Gopnik’s critique is valid in that animals had been used and abused long before “usury” or “Marxism” entered the vocabulary, but in this attachment-centric article, he does not touch on factory farming, puppy mills, or the internet sales of animals. However, he has earlier admitted that he didn’t want to take time to search out a breeder with his daughter, so she “quietly decided she could live with a Manhattan petstore ‘puppy mill’ dog if she could check its eyes for signs of illness and its temperament for symptoms of sweetness.” Butterscotch seems fine, but Gopnik's decision suggests that when people deal with dogs, convenience wins over caution on a dog’s behalf. Nor does he discuss how apartment life, like modern affluent life in general, excludes much of what could be part of a dog's, and a human's, experience, so that almost the entire focus is on a protected and specific affective relationship.

There is no doubt that Gopnik has come to love his dog (he debates behavioral reductionism of both canine and human responses), to the point of becoming one of those dog people he used to mock. This essay is a pleasant introduction to several books and theories, and as a New Yorker piece Gopnik can skip the detailed logic and documentation of scholarly work to offer sweeping interpretations of the human and the dog: “Dogs have little imagination about us and our inner lives but limitless intuition about them; we have false intuitions about their inner lives but limitless imagination about them. Our relationship meets in the middle.” You can judge if indeed less than two years of dog ownership and lots of book reading have given Gopnik insights, not just into dogs but into human desires.